When the Perfect Mate Is Standing Right in Front of You

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CreditJosh Winata

By Vincent M. Mallozzi

July 22, 2017

Van Ann Dang Bui, a daughter of Thuy Dang Bui and the Rev. Hien The Bui of Sugar Land, Tex., was married on July 22 to Mario René Ruiz, a son of Rosa Maria Ruiz of the Bronx and the late Robert Luis Ruiz. The bride’s father, a Southern Baptist minister, officiated at the Connecticut River Museum in Essex, Conn., with the Rev. Martin Azurdia, an Evangelical priest and an uncle of the groom, taking part.

The bride, 30, works in Manhattan as the director of the law program at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, a nonprofit organization that provides training and internships for minority students about to enter law school.

She graduated from Southern Methodist and received her law degree from Columbia.

The bride’s father is a pastor at Sugar Land Vietnamese Church. Her mother is a software consultant in Houston for Enbridge, a Canadian gas pipeline company.

The groom, 29, was until July 14 an investment associate at Napier Park Global Capital, an asset management firm in Manhattan. Next month, he will begin studying for an M.B.A. at Yale. He graduated cum laude from Baruch College.

The groom’s father retired as a technician for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Brooklyn.

Ms. Bui and Mr. Ruiz met through a mutual friend in March 2013, while vacationing in Miami.

“I noticed her as soon as she walked into the hotel lobby,” Mr. Ruiz said. “She was beautiful.”

She already had a boyfriend, though.

“But Mario seemed like a nice guy,” Ms. Bui said, “and when we got back to New York, I started socializing more with his group of friends.”

Ms. Bui soon broke up with her boyfriend, and a friendship with Mr. Ruiz blossomed, the two of them bonding over a love of food, SoulCycle and “Law & Order.”

In December, they were out with friends at a restaurant when Ms. Bui asked if anyone wanted to get dessert elsewhere. Mr. Ruiz was the only one who obliged her, and they were soon sharing chocolate cake at a dessert bar in the East Village.

“I thought he was incredibly witty,” she said, “and we seemed to share many of the same interests.”

By the next year, they had grown close enough to talk to each other about people they were dating, though neither was willing to admit that the search for the perfect mate had really ended that night in the dessert shop.

In the ensuing months, they continued to “dance around each other,” as Ms. Bui put it, until November 2014, when Ms. Bui told Mr. Ruiz she had invited a man she was dating to her apartment for dinner. At the time, she had also been talking about a possible move back to her native Texas.

Mr. Ruiz suddenly stopped dancing and started texting. “I think you’re trying too hard to meet a guy,” he wrote in part.

“The whole thing just lit a fire under me,” he said. “I started thinking that whether she moved or got serious with someone else, she could be gone from my life forever.”

Ms. Bui was furious.

“He basically said I was lowering my standards when it came to dating,” she said. “Here he is criticizing me, but nowhere in his texts are the words ‘You should be dating me.’”

But she couldn’t stay angry at him for long, and on Dec. 10 — her birthday — she invited him over for a home-cooked meal. Then there was a birthday card he sent that told her how much he appreciated her, an early-morning trip for Cronuts, a snowstorm that forced him to sleep over at her apartment, and a New Year’s Eve dinner at a Manhattan restaurant, which each considered the first date. “Despite knowing Mario as well as I did, I still had butterflies in my stomach,” Ms. Bui said.

In February 2015, he invited her over to watch the Super Bowl, and later that month, he read aloud from a letter he had written for her: “My dad once told me that you found someone special when their mere existence puts a smile on your face, and you have etched a permanent smile on mine.

“You’re the first thing I think about when I get up in the morning and the last thing before I go to sleep.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page ST12 of the New York edition with the headline: The Perfect Mate? Right in Front of You. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe